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The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain su
by andensande 5y ago
The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted).
Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,
(1) I am walking to the shops.
is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?
(2a) I live in Berlin.
(2b) I'm living in Berlin.
To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.
There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.
A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:
(3) She would have had to have been being watched.
Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.
- User23 5y agoOne of my favorites is adjective order. Pink riding big elephant just sounds wrong to a native speaker, but almost none could tell you why.
- quercusa 5y agohttps://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...
- irrational 5y agoThis explains the most common order, but not why that is the order. What are the underlying rules that determine that is the best order?
- msrenee 5y agoBig pink riding elephant would be the more natural sequence to me if there are any non-native speakers who are curious. I know there's an established order of types of adjectives. However in this example, it's more of a part of speech order issue to my ear. With riding being both an adjective and a verb, it feels like someone named "pink" is riding a big elephant when the words are in this order. This may be due to the fact that we don't have much for case indicators. So the adjective "pink" is indistinguishable from a guy whose nickname is "Pink". "Riding" as in a riding animal vs a pack animal is identical to "riding" the verb. All you're missing is the artical "a" before big elephant and it could very well be a sentence fragment. "Fred, riding a big elephant, burst into the arena" substitutes "pink" for a more common name and adds the article and a prepositional phrase and... some grammar that I can't put into words right now and makes it a full sentence. I guess what I'm trying to get across is that without the adjective order being in line, it's hard to work out the sentence structure which is extremely reliant on word order in lieu of inflection.
- irrational 5y agoI studied linguistics in college and I remember a class on this. But that was 25 years ago. I think it had something to do with how much a part of the object the adjective is, or how easy it would be to change. Red concrete wall instead of concrete red wall because it is fairly easy to change the color of the wall from red to blue, but much harder to change the wall from concrete to wood. So we put concrete closer to the object and red farther away.
- scrollaway 5y agoLove that last example. I think "to have been being watched" is a bit of a reach though? "To have been observed / under observation" feels more natural. When translating it to french i got to "elle aurait dûe être observée". Incidentally, French has an easier time with this, I think because we have more options there. I couldn't reproduce the quirky structure at all, the flow is just more natural in french.
- andensande 5y agoYou can gloss it with 'under observation' I think fairly well. But the problem with (1) She would have had to have been observed. is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?
- phasetransition 5y ago(native speaker) I agree. The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place. "She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.
- ninefathom 5y agoNative English speaker here, with training in linguistics, and several other languages under my belt over the years. In my native dialect, statements including "had to have been being" are rather common. My friends, family, co-workers, etc. use them regularly. In fact, I recall saying "he'd have had to have been being reckless" just earlier today. All five of the other people present- both immediate family and non-relatives from this area- knew precisely what was meant. In other words, that intimidating clump of verbs passed unremarked. Further, to andensande's point, one might be inclined to replace that god-awful monstrosity with something like "he must've been reckless." To do so would be to wipe out some subtleties of meaning from the original. A replacement like "he must've been acting recklessly at the time" feels like the same general meaning to me, but it also sounds stuffy and snobbish in tone (for all that it's probably a much more effective construction). All things considered, every language that I've ever dealt with in any capacity has had its share of peculiarities. In hindsight, however, I don't recall Arabic, Zulu, or even Gallo-Lati... er, I mean French... having quite as few peculiarities as my sponge-like mother tongue.
- bonchicbongenre 5y agoI very much agree with English being a hodgepodge of confusing rules, especially those tense-related. Re rewtriting (3) though: does not the following suffice? "She must have been being watched". I can imagine an argument that "She would have had to have" is not equivalent to "She must have" on grounds that the "have had" might suggest additionally that the past-ongoing-watching no longer occurs. I don't really think this flies, though, since the natural reading of "been being watched" already suggests to me that the watching was relegated to the past ("been" being interpreted as only connoting the past, not the "inclusive-or"-type interpretation "previously and perhaps presently"; much as "or" itself is - to my chagrin! - generally interpreted exclusively in standard parlance). I couldn't think of how to simplify the "been being" though; that is a tough nut.
- lemoncucumber 5y agoA similar example: As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?” 1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.” 2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.” 3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.” As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
- irrational 5y agoI would say “I’d guess it’s some German supercar.” Does contracting the “I would” make it more difficult for a non native speaker to understand?
- detaro 5y agoAs a non-native speaker, I'd say it depends on their background and how they learned. To me it feels completely normal and the non-contracted form took longer for me to parse, I think because the contraction is more common in colloquial communication with native speakers, but I'm also sure that if you tried this on me at a point in life where I had mostly school english to go on, the contraction would be more difficult.
- rsa4046 5y agoThe first two seem consistent as tentative responses to a statement that might contain hyperbole, joke, play on words, double entendre, etc., by maintaining some distance with the statement of supercar-as-fact. In contrast, the third seems to accept the fact outright, and lets the accuracy of the responder assume the uncertainty.
- Talanes 5y agoThe third reply strips so much away that the tone changes from tentative to apathetic. The third speaker is just doing the bare minimum to keep conversation moving.
- 5y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoYour examples are participles, not gerunds.
- wizzard 5y agoThat’s how I learned it too, but apparently that is “traditional” grammar. In “modern” grammar any verb with the -ing ending is a gerund now according to Wikipedia.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoGerunds are used as nouns. Nobody writing for wikipedia can change that.
- wizzard 5y agoIt's not an invention of Wikipedia editors. If you just read the first paragraph of the article it explains the accepted meaning has evolved over time. It further explains "The distinction between gerund and present participles is not recognised in modern reference grammars, since many uses are ambiguous."
- irrational 5y ago> She would have had to have been being watched. Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely? Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido que haber estado vigilada.” I know Spanish well enough to know that is hilariously incorrect, but not well enough to know the correct translation.
- mucholove 5y agoI speak both English and Dominican Spanish natively. Here is my translation: “Tendrían que haber estado mirándola.” “Vigilado” is a much stronger word and to me it would be much more like “guarded” Ive studied Chinese before and a translation eludes me. If anybody can help, my guess the trick is in : “ 本来就” of 她本来就必须被监视
- ahoyleo 5y agoThe Chinese translation could work. I'd try 她早该被一直看着
- flobosg 5y agoIMO the Google translation is almost correct. My take would be “Ella habría tenido que haber estado siendo observada”.
- solatic 5y agoOne issue that prevents translation is just how much passivity is in that sentence. In other languages, more active grammar is preferred, to the point where trying to construct such passivity on purpose would be nigh unintelligible. For example, in Hebrew, I would translate the sentence as חייב להיות שמישהו היה צופה בה, which literally translates as "it must be that someone was watching her". Trying a more literal take, היא הייתה חייבת להיות צפויה, not only (by sheer necessity) injects the infinitive tense into the middle of the sentence, but also would just cause a native speaker to ask you in English, "why don't you tell me in English what you're really trying to say?"
- dataflow 5y ago> She would have had to have been being watched. OK, now I feel like I don't know English. Is this proper English? What does it mean? How is it different from "She would have had to have been watched"? Is the meaning clear to people? I'm scratching my head... Did you mean "She would have had to have felt like she's being watched"?
- sfblah 5y agoI’m a native English speaker here and it’s clear to me. I also think it’s somewhat tricky to express it more succinctly without changing the sentence a fair bit. Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.” Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, but not necessarily in the exact instant we’re talking about. Also, like the example above, your version could mean she’s someone who in general is watched (like the person who generally lives in Berlin), as opposed to someone being watched right during the instant we’re talking about. Complicated!
- dataflow 5y agoAH! Ok, I think I distilled it down to something simpler: It seems to be similar to the difference between "I would've been spoken to" vs. "I would've been being spoken to". Is that correct? Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...
- reshlo 5y agoThe former is past perfect[1], and the latter is past perfect progressive.[2] There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Past_perfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Past_perfect_progressive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...
- hilbert42 5y ago"She would have had to have been being watched." Wow, whoever concocted that mind-twister? That's the sort of problem we students would have given our formal logic lecturer to analyze and draw up into truth tables. That expression likely exceeds the complexity of an infamous expression (known for its complexity) that was given to us students to analyze, it being 'there is a chance of a possible maybe'. It hurts my brain just thinking about it, perhaps I'll do so later. ;-)
- cycomanic 5y agoI find it weird that many English natives try to claim that English grammar is in fact complex (you are by far not the first). I think it might be because in general many don't speak another language and the most common second language is Spanish which has also a very "simple" grammar. Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect and simple past (also exist in English), which many native speakers in both English and German get wrong as well. An interesting anecdote (which might be related) is, that in my experience having gone to high-school in the US for a year and having done language courses with Australian teachers, that there seems to be much less education on the grammar of the language than in Germany. I often knew the "theory" of English grammar much better than the native speakers (doesn't mean I was better at applying it though). All that said, mastering English is still difficult, just not due to the grammar. Spelling is one thing, but also the vocabulary is huge. Supposedly Shakespeares vocabulary was 60000 words, the equivalent German poet Goethes was less than 40000.
- maxnoe 5y agoGerman Goethe researchers claim 90.000 for Goethe im their dictionary of Goethe's work: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe-W%C3%B6rterbuch https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe-W%C3%B6rterbuch
- cycomanic 5y agoInteresting, I wonder if this is due to a difference of counting compound words?
- Teknoman117 5y agoEnglish grammar is heavily taught in elementary school (K-5, ~age 5 to 11) and middle school (6-8, ~age 11-14) curriculum in the US. You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.) This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago> To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. “Someone must have been watching her.” I’m making some assumptions about the context of the sentence—but as long as you told me what the context was, I’m sure I could come up with an equally simple replacement. Personally, I found the original sentence quite hard to parse, despite being a native speaker. It’s not good writing and a good editor would replace it.
- cycomanic 5y agoActually, if I'm not wrong your example 2a and 2b is about simple present vs present continuous not gerund. Isn't gerund something like "I like swimming" or "I like to swim" (where both works) or while "I enjoy swimming" only works with gerund? Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.
- HelloNurse 5y agoPresent continuous is built from gerund, like other continuous tenses. The important difference is therefore between the "simple" verb and gerund. What you refer to is a different use case of gerund.
- NoOneNew 5y agoMy confusion with complaints about English is the expectation of rules being across the board. Pretty much all languages have irregular verbs or nouns that conjugate differently than the standard method laid out in that language. Portugese and French have a fuckton of these, no one bats an eye. English has a few inconsistencies, everyone loses their shit. The amount of inconsistencies in English are pretty damn few compared to other languages I attempted. While I get the spelling is an issue, it's not like it's alone in that department.